Well this IS something! I really hope (as I always do) that this could lead to a permanent cure of HIV and Leukemia. The only additional thing I would wish for is that the big drug companies see none of the profit from this breakthrough. I’m convinced there exists a non money making cure to AIDS. But I suppose that it would be wide knowledge by now.

“The patient is fine,” said Dr. Gero Hutter of Charite Universitatsmedizin Berlin in Germany. “Today, two years after his transplantation, he is still without any signs of HIV disease and without antiretroviral medication.”

The case was first reported in November, and the new report is the first official publication of the case in a medical journal. Hutter and a team of medical professionals performed the stem cell transplant on the patient, an American living in Germany, to treat the man’s leukemia, not the HIV itself.

However, the team deliberately chose a compatible donor who has a naturally occurring gene mutation that confers resistance to HIV. The mutation cripples a receptor known as CCR5, which is normally found on the surface of T cells, the type of immune system cells attacked by HIV.

This is an excellent advancement in repairing brain damage caused by strokes, etc. While there is a small downside that injected stem cells could get stuck in tissue, the discovery far outweighs that small stumbling block. Also I assume that the people against stem cell research don’t so much like this either.

“If you use neural stem cells,” says Yanai, “they are your little doctors. They’re looking for the defect, they’re diagnosing it, and they’re differentiating into what’s needed to repair the defect. They are doing my job, in a way.”

University of Michigan researchers have discovered that a key protein in cells plays a critical role in not one, but two processes affecting the development of cancer.

“Most proteins involved in responding to DNA damage that can cause cancer either help detect the damage and warn the rest of the cell, or help repair the damage,” says David O. Ferguson, M.D., Ph.D., the study’s lead author. Ferguson is an assistant professor of pathology at the U-M Medical School and a member of U-M’s Comprehensive Cancer Center.

“We’ve discovered the weak spot of HIV,” declared Dr Sudhir Paul of the University of Texas Medical School in Houston on Thursday.

Current HIV drugs cannot destroy the virus because of its ability to mutate and adapt to drugs by changing its coating. Eventually the virus prevails and the infected person succumbs to the infection.

But Dr Paul believes they have cracked the “Achilles heel” of the HIV virus — a small region where the virus cannot change its coating because it is the attachment point to T lymphocytes, the key cell in cell-mediated immunity. If that region is targeted, the virus can be destroyed.

The researchers have tested their findings by arming the immune system with their new weapon that lab tests and animal trials show WORKS.

By harvesting stem cells from the victim of a certain disease, scientists can now observe similar cells dying from the disease. This will enable them to do more research on what causes the disease and how to stop it.